MS Project
1. Leverage Existing Standard Project Data Across All your Projects. When managing multiple projects where the resources, resource calendars, among other parameters are the same, you don’t have to enter these in from scratch every time on each new project. Minimize data entry to certain key fields using the Organizer tool to copy custom filters, tables, views, and reports to use between projects. 2. Setup up your Resource Sheet from the Get-go. Input your resources in the Resource Sheet before you start scheduling. Doing this will allow you to pick them from a drop-down menu on the Gantt Chart. Doing this will save you from having to manually enter them every time, avoiding the risk of duplicating or misspelling resource names. 3. On Cross-departmental Projects, Indicate Department for Better Organization. On the Resource Sheet, use the Group column to indicate which department your resources belongs to. This will help with filtering and reporting to easily see what departments are responsible for. 4. Switch to Auto Scheduling. By default, all new tasks are set up to be manually scheduled. Don’t enter Start Dates or Finish Dates directly into the Gantt Chart. Instead, let the program calculate them for you based on duration, intelligent scheduling options, linking, and resource availability. This will save your head from hurting and missing deadlines. 5. Avoid Setting Deadlines on Undefined Tasks. Exclusive of mandatory deadlines, setting deadlines, where WBS is not fully defined, just to have a deadline is not a best practice, nor has value. Depending on how you set up your tasks and deadlines, you could run into issues making it more complicated to manage down the road. 6. Minimize Time Constraints. Minimize your use of specific date constraints on tasks. When a schedule change occurs, you will have to manually edit those tasks. Instead, try using intelligent scheduling options such as, "As Soon As Possible" "No Earlier Than" and "No Later Than" constraints. These allow for dynamic schedule changes. "Must..." constraints are best reserved for mandatory deadlines because they don’t provide the same dynamic flexibility so you would have to directly edit the individual task. This also preserves your mandatory deadlines. 7. Use Only One Task Type. Microsoft Project has three types of tasks you can use. * Fixed Units * Fixed Duration * Fixed Work Using multiple tasks types can cause errors and make the schedule hard to follow. Pick one task type to select as your default and stick to it. 8. Visually Distinguish Your Critical Path. One of the key challenges with large complex projects is keeping track of the critical path. You can easily visually distinguish your critical path by highlighting or specially formatting your critical path tasks. To do this, you click on Format > Text Styles > Item to Change: Critical Tasks. You can also highlight critical tasks in the Gantt chart by clicking on Format and then clicking the Critical Tasks checkbox. 9. Build Contingency into the Schedule from the Start. There are many types of contingency you should build into your schedule: cost, time, hours, resources, etc. Fortunately, there are a few ways to add it into your projects: * For cost contingency, create a formula adding a % to your cost. For example, you could create a Cost © with Contingency column = C * .10. Note that this does not impact hours or time. * For schedulecontingency, create unassigned tasks to use artificial delays in the project plan. Note that these don’t increase your cost. * Another schedulecontingency approach is to use a reduced-hour day, such as 7 hours, instead of 8 hours. This effectively provides an additional hour per day in schedule slippage. Note this will only increase the time and not cost or hours. * If your contingency will effectively impact the schedule and cost, thenadd hours, either as a separate task or bake it into existing tasks. 10. Listen to the Planning Wizard. When those bothersome “Wizard” messages pop up, such as, “This action will cause a scheduling conflict...,” address them right then and there. If you ignore them then tracing back to their root cause will be more difficult. 11. Avoid creating predecessor/successor task relationships between summary tasks. We know Microsoft Project's software allows this functionality, but you will find that it causes issues as work progresses and the inevitable project schedule changes occur. A WBS that has dependencies among summary tasks is not recommended by the Project Management Institute's (Project Management Body of Knowledge). 12. Avoid assigning resources to summary tasks. Summary task resource assignments calculate "level of effort" work to the assigned resource. Level of effort assignments should only be used by advanced project managers who have experience with level of effort work assignments. 13. Only one task in a project should be entered without a predecessor. This would be the task that starts the project. Any task that doesn't seem like it should have a predecessor should have the first task as its predecessor. Remember, we are talking about tasks here, NOT summary tasks which should have no predecessors or successors. 14. Only one task in a project should be without a successor. This would be the closing task for the project. Any task that doesn't seem like it should have a successor should have the last task as its successor. 15. All tasks should have a "Work" (hours) value when being assigned to resources. While you may not know how many hours the task will take to complete, it is better to have some work in the task than to have 0. The easiest way to do this is to simply allow the default in the system to assign the resource 100% of the hours during the duration of the task. While this may be an incorrect value (most resources are probably doing more than that one task each day of the task's duration), it is usually better to see that the resource is 100% busy throughout the task's schedule than to have it look like the resource is doing nothing on those days.